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Viking Age
The Viking Age lasted from about 840 AD until 1014 AD. It began with the intensification of Viking activities from 840 AD, after the sporadic raiding that began with Lindisfarne in 793 AD. It then ended with the beginning of the decline of the Viking threat around 1014 AD. The Viking Age has been described as the darkest of the Dark Ages for Western Europe. The British Isles and France experienced the most dramatic influx of Viking peoples with startlingly differing effects; it helped England and Scotland to unite for their own defence, while France splintered into regional feudalism. Meanwhile, the Byzantine Empire revived its fortunes under Emperor Basil I and his successors, and the Muslim world experienced a cultural zenith though regional Caliphates became the rule. History The Vikings On 8 June 793 AD, the monks on the island monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria, were unpleasantly surprised by the arrival of violent pagan raiders from the sea. This was not the first encounter with the Vikings or Norsemen from Scandinavia, but the attack on one of the most prominent monastic communities in the British Isles sent a shockwave throughout Western Europe. The Germanic tribes of Scandinavian obviously had a long history before they exploded onto the historical record during the Viking Age. By early Classical Antiquity, the coastline of Scandinavia was dotted with settlements. When the climate was warm, Scandinavia could enjoy population booms. Since the agricultural capabilities of the land couldn't sustain this increased population, and resulted was population overspill. Invariably it was the young men hardened by their harsh northern existence who coalesced into gangs, and sought new opportunities. In the 5th and 6th centuries, gold and silver became plentiful in Scandinavia, clearly ransacked from the Roman Empire by Scandinavians fighting alongside their cousin Germanic tribes. Meanwhile, the mountainous terrain and fjords allowed independent Scandinavian communities to develop with the sea as the easiest way of communication with each other and the outside would. Equipped with longboats which oars and sails could take across seas and up shallow rivers, from the late 8th century onwards the Vikings launched the last and most dramatic exodus in the long story of migration from Scandinavia. Not all sought the same thing: the Norwegians who struck out for Iceland wanted to colonise; the Swedes who penetrated Eastern Europe via the Dvina and Dnieper rivers wanted to trade, where they were known as the Rus and gave their name to Russia; and the Danes did most of the plundering the Vikings are now remembered for. But no group of these people had a monopoly of any one of them. Their behaviour towards foreigners was largely dictated by relative strengths: where the land was largely deserted they settled; and in Eastern Europe where they had regular contact with the wealthy and powerful Byzantines and Muslims they traded. Yet, it was in the wealthy but weak Western Europe that the Vikings truly earned the reputation that defined them. Vikings in the British Isles For several decades after 793 AD, the Vikings confined themselves to hit-and-run raids against coastal targets in the British Isles. The undefended island monasteries of Skye and Iona in Scotland, and Rathlin in Ireland were all raided within two years of Lindisfarne, and repeatedly afterwards. By 840, the Vikings had several bases around the British Isles to over-winter and extend their raiding season, especially in Ireland and the islands of Scotland. A well-fortified base was established by the Vikings on the River Liffey in 837 AD that eventually became the modern day capital of Ireland, Dublin. They also settled Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Wexford. Meanwhile in Scotland, they were restricted to the islands, as successive clashes with the Vikings had forced the Picts and Celts to cease their traditional hostility with each other and unite to form the Kingdom of Scotland; the traditional date is the year 843. However, the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland, and Isle of Man would remain part of the Viking Kingdom of the Isles until the middle of the 13th century. The hit-and-run raids dramatically escalated in 865 AD, when a Viking army from Denmark some 3,000 strong arrived in the south-east of England equipped for conquest rather than quick booty; the Great Heathen Army. York, the second most important city in Anglo-Saxon England and the capital of Northumbria, was taken in 866. It would become the capital of a century of Danish territory in England; Danelaw. In the next four years, the kings of Mercia and East Anglia capitulated to Viking demands, and handed over land to the invading Norse settlers. In 870, the Vikings advanced into the last of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex. After meeting the most determined opposition thus far, they captured Reading. Then at the Battle of Ashdown (871) the Wessex men won the first significant English victory of the war. In the aftermath, Wessex also made terms with the Danes for their withdrawal, though it proved impossible to recapture Reading. Meanwhile, Ashdown had introduced a figure of huge significance in English history; the commander that day was Alfred the Great (871-899 AD). He proved both a wide administrator and brilliant general, and became the only monarch in England to earn the epithet "the Great", other than the Scandinavian Cnut the Great. The early years of his reign were merely a struggled for survival. He was finaly given some respite when Northumbria revolted against the Viking puppet king. Alfred used the time to restructure of the military defences of Wessex around fortified towns; these burgs as they were known would later have the unforeseen benefit of helping to revive town-life in England. He also established the beginnings of an English fleet and by 875 could claim a small naval victory against seven Danish ships. However, the Danes regularly broke the peace terms agreed after Ashdown, and in 878 open hostilities resumed. Alfred was almost captured when a Viking invasion force suddenly attacked the royal stronghold of Chippenham. This was the lowest ebb for the English cause, the nearest that the Danes came to conquering Wessex and thus the whole of England. Nevertheless, within a few months Alfred was strong enough to move east and defeat the Vikings at Battle of Edington (878 AD). In the aftermath, the Treaty of Wedmore essentially agreed the mutual co-existence of Alfred domain in the south-west of England, and the Viking Danelaw in the north-east. Possibly more significantly, the Danish king of East Anglia also agreed to be baptized a Christian, a step towards the conversion of Scandinavia. During the remainder of his reign, Alfred concern himself with restoring the cultural well-being of his kingdom, which included Mercia as well as Wessex. He encouraged education, taught in English vernacular rather than Latin, with key works in Latins were translated into English. An Anglo-Saxon account of English history was compiled, based on various sources including those of the Venerable Bede. He also improved his kingdom's legal system, coinage, and his people's quality of life. Alfred’s successors were able to move onto the offensive against the Danish Vikings, expanding into their territory, and building forts and towns on Alfred’s model. In 917 AD, East Anglia was taken and incorporated into the English kingdom. Ten years later, under Alfred’s grandson, Athelstan (924-927, the last remaining Viking kingdom based around York was conquered, making him the first Anglo-Saxon king to directly rule the whole of England. However, the unification of England still remained uncertainty. Under Athelstan's successors the English repeatedly lost and regained control of Northumbria to the Vikings, until the kingdom was finally consolidated under Edgar (959-975); it has remained united ever since. Meanwhile, the great struggle with the Vikings had forged the English into an embryonic nation. Nevertheless, the Vikings threat was not over. The revival of trade that England had enjoyed over the last century had made England wealthy, and encouraged a fresh wave of Danish raiding from 980 AD, during the reign of Ethelred the Unready (978-1013). After the English were defeated resoundingly at Battle of Maldon (991 AD), Ethelred agreed to an annual payment of Danegeld, a bribe to the Viking raiders to leave. Inevitably, it tended to draw further raiding rather than discourage it, and ultimately led to the invasion of England by Cnut the Great. Meanwhile in Celtic Ireland during the 9th and 10th century, the Vikings in Dublin and other key strongholds were in constant warfare with the many petty-kingdoms of Ireland; with a population of fewer than 500,000 people, Ireland had over 150 kings with greater or lesser domains. The Vikings suffered several reverses, and were pushed out completely in 902 AD, only to return. Relations with the Vikings were rarely clean-cut in Ireland; local petty-kingdoms allied with the Vikings against their local rivals, as often as fought to drive them out. Things changed in 1002 AD, when Brian Boru (1002-14) of the petty-kingdom of Munster was accepted as High King of All Ireland and determined to end the Viking scourge. The decisive confrontation came at the Battle of Clontarf (1014). Although Brian Boru was victorious, both he and his son died during the battle. Although the Viking presence in Ireland was not ended by Clontarf, it marked the beginning of its slow decline. Nonetheless, with the death of Brian Buru and his son, the opportunity to forge Ireland into a nation with a true sense of an Irish identity, as had happened in England and Scotland, had been lost. Ireland quickly descended again into a patchwork of rival pretty-kingdoms, which persisted until the dramatic arrival of the Normans. Vikings in France Viking raids along the northern and western French coast began between 790 and 800 during the later years of the elderly Charlemagne's rule. With the chaos of civil war between Charlemagne’s grandsons between 830 and 843, the Viking advances were allowed to escalate, with their dreaded longboats sailing up the Loire and Seine Rivers, and other inland waterways, wreaking havoc and spreading terror. The early culmination of their raiding came in 845 AD during the reign of Charles the Bald (843-877). Some 120 Viking ships sailed up the River Seine, and plundered and occupied Paris, until they were bribed to leave. By 851 AD, the Vikings were overwintering in the Seine valley to extend their raiding season. Paris was again besieged in 885 AD, and although they failed to breach the city, they were again bribed to leave. When the Viking came again to besiege the capital in 911 AD, Charles III (879-929) had no more gold to offer. Instead he signed a treaty with the Viking leader Rollo, granting him the land of the Duchy of Normandy, in exchange for guarding the Seine estuaries from further Viking attacks. Rollo also agreeing to be baptised Christian. Meanwhile, the Viking onslaught led to the virtual breakdown of royal authority in France. With the kings ineffectual, peasants naturally turned to their local lords for protection. France became a tapestry of local semi-independent ducjies and dotted with their castles. With the hit-and-run Viking raids, armies need to be more mobile so cavalry became predominant, the predecessor of the French chivalry so famous during the next six-hundred years. By 987 AD, the line of Charlemagne died out, and the nobles elected one of their own count Hugh Capet (987-996 AD) to the throne. Nevertheless, his lands and real authority extended little beyond the Paris basin; many of his nominal vassals ruled territories far greater. Yet the longevity of the Capetian dynasty which lasted until 1328 would allow the slow and gradual process of the exerting royal control of the rest of the country to occur. In Normandy, within a generation the Normans had abandoned most of their Viking traditions, and taken to French feudalism, customs and Christianity; although Rollo himself hedged his bets and on his death had one-hundred prisoners sacrificed to Odin. Rollo’s descendants faced an uncertain future against ambitious neighbouring duchies and even the French king himself. Under Rollo’s grandson Richard I (942-996 AD), even Louis IV tried to drive off the barbarians, but Richard invited some Vikings to pillage the Seine valley and the king soon got the message. Richard was a great patron of the Church, restoring their lands and ensuring the great monasteries flourished in Normandy. By the end of his long reign, Normandy was on firmer footing as one of many Christian feudal duchies; even if his fellow nobles still called him the Duke of the Pirates. Richard's great-grandson would reach even greater heights; William the Conqueror. Vikings in Russia Unlike in Western Europe, trade rather than plunder was the main reason that the Vikings penetrated deep into Russia during the 9th century AD. The rivers of Eastern Europe, flowing north and south, made it surprisingly easy for goods to travel between the Baltic and the Black Sea. In the middle of the 9th century, the Vikings, who were known in the east as the Rus, established key bases at Kiev, Novgorod, and Moscow, trading in furs, wax, honey and slaves with the Byzantine Empire and Muslim Abbasid Caliphate for luxuries. By the time the Rus were united into a state under Vladimir the Great (969-1015), they had become something new and different from Vikings; Russians. In about 988, Vladimir took a step which gave Russia its characteristic identity; he was persuaded to convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The new religion was rapidly and often forcibly imposed on his fellow Russians. Vikings Elsewhere The travels of the Vikings took them far and wide. Iceland was settled mostly by Norwegians in 874 AD. A Viking settlement in Greenland established in 986 AD lasted until the 14th century. In about 986, the Norwegian Vikings from Greenland even reached North America, over five-hundred years before Christopher Columbus, and attempted to settle the land they called Vinland on the northern peninsula of present-day Newfoundland; it lasted some 20 years. In Southern Europe, Cadiz and Lisbon were attacked in Muslim Spain in 844 AD. They also sacked Pisa in Italy in 860 AD, which according to the traditional account they thought was Rome. Byzantine Revival The internal turmoil of the Iconoclasm Controversy finally came to an end during the reign of young Michael III (842-867 AD), when his mother, the regent, restored the veneration of icons once and for all. However, Michael proved yet another weak ruler himself, and Sicily began to gradually slipping from Byzantine control to the Muslims. It was under his successor, Basil the Macedonian (867-886 AD), that the empire began to recover. In the east the Byzantines made small territorial gains against the Muslims in Anatolia for the first time in almost a hundred years. In the west, he stemmed the tide of the Muslim advance from conquered Sicily into Byzantine southern Italy. Basil re-established the Byzantine navy that once again came to the dominate the eastern Mediterranean, paving the way for increased trade and an economic boom. Meanwhile, the archbishop of Constantinople set to work converting the Slavs and Bulgarians to Christianity, pulling them into the sphere of influence of the Byzantines. Basil’s reign led to a revival of imperial power, a renaissance of Byzantine art and architecture, and the establishment a dynasty that would see the empire achieve its last great flowering over the next century and a half. Basil’s successors produced a string of some of the ablest emperors in Byzantine history. In the east, the empire rebuilt its defences and went on the offensive. Under Romanos I (919–944 AD), most of Armenia and parts of Syria were reconquered. Under Nikephoros II (963-969), the Muslims were decisively expelled from Crete. He then campaigned deep into Syria putting an end to Arab raids on Byzantine territory, and most spectacular of all recovering the great city of Antioch. The Byzantines reached their apex during the reign of emperor Basil II (976-1025 AD). With boundless energy and an iron will, Basil began a protracted war of outright conquest against the Bulgarians in Thrace and Macedonia. The conquest was essentially over by 1014 AD. To break the final resistance, Basil had fourteen-thousand captives blinded, with one in every hundred spared one eye to lead the rest back to their king, earning himself the moniker the Bulgar Slayer. Bulgaria would remain part of the empire for the next two-hundred years. Basil expanded the empire more than any emperor since Heraclius and created an army second to none, but his most far-reaching decision was to offer the hand of his sister to Prince Vladimir of Kiev, leading to the conversion of the Russians to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Germany of Otto the Great Germany also suffered from Viking raids especially of the cities on the Rhine like Cologne and Bonn, but none as dramatic as in France and the British Isles. In all likelihood, this was largely due to the shared border with Denmark allowing for more direct political engagement with Scandinavian. Meanwhile, the Carolingian dynasty finally petered out in 911 AD. The only legitimate claimant within the Carolingian dynasty was the king of the France, but rather than do homage to him, and reunite the empire of Charlemagne, German nobles elected one of their own number to the vacant throne. Their leaders of the Feudal states in Germany tended to accept the rule of any strong king but reasserted their independence in other reigns. Under the second of these kings, Henry the Fowler (919-936), the bordering section of the former Middle Francia was brought under German hegemony, including the former imperial capital of Aachen. The reign of his successor, Otto the Great (936-973), saw a great revival of Germany. Under Otto, the king's authority was greatly consolidated at the expense of the nobles and bishops, unifying Germany into a single kingdom. He then secured the eastern border with a decisive victory against the Magyars of Hungary at the Battle of Lechfeld (955 AD). Meanwhile since the death of the last Carolingian king of Frankish northern Italy, its throne had been often disputed. Like Charlemagne, Otto marched into Frankish Italy in 951, at the invitation of the archbishop of Rome, and named himself King of the Lombards. And like Charlemagne, the archbishop of Rome crowned him Holy Roman Emperor, reviving the title in an unbroken line of Holy Roman Emperors lasting for more than eight centuries. Otto and his successors regarded the imperial crown as a mandate to control the archbishop of Rome. They dismissed popes at their will and installed replacements more to their liking. This power, together with territories covering much of central Europe, gave the German Empire and the imperial title prestige as the leading ruler within Europe from the late 10th century. The patronage of the Ottonians facilitated a so-called Ottonian Renaissance of arts and architecture in Germany. Rise of Regional Muslim Powers From the 9th century, the rule of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad was in many parts of the Muslim world more nominal than real. Spain under the Umayyads and North Africa under the local Moorish dynasties were already independent. By about 870, eastern Persia was in the hands of locals hostile to Baghdad. The weakness of the Caliphs tempted them into a measure which makes the problem worse; the excellent Mamelukes slave-soldiers. Well placed to advance their own interests, they frequently took the opportunity. By 868, a Mamelukes general called Ahmad ibn Tulun had taken control of Egypt. For several decades, it swapped hands a number of times before the Fatimid Caliphate established hegemony over Egypt in 969; masters of a broader swathe of Mediterranean coastline from Carthage to Cairo. The Fatimids were the first major Caliphate of the Shia branch of Islam, rather than Orthodox Sunni Islam; a schism in Islam that dated back to the succession to Muhammad. Any semblance of central authority in the Muslim world had been destroyed. Nonetheless, although regional Caliphates became the rule, the cultural Golden Age continued unabated with great strides made in philosophy and architecture, mathematics and astronomy, science and healthcare. By the late 10th century, Cordoba in Spain was arguably the most spectacular city of the medieval Europe, as well as a great cultural, political, financial and economic centre. Category:Historical Periods